A few more articles from the January/February 2011 issue of Touchstone are now available online.
Sanger’s Victory
How Planned Parenthood’s Founder Played the Christians—and Won
by Allan Carlson
Margaret Sanger was born in 1879 in Corning, New York, and raised in a stridently socialist, feminist, and atheist home. Her father “deplored” the Roman Catholic Church. In 1913 she journeyed to Europe to study contraceptive techniques. The following year, she launched her publication The Woman Rebel under the masthead, “No Gods, No Masters.” The same year she also popularized the phrase, “birth control.”
On July 5, 1915, Sanger gave a speech at the Fabian Society Hall in London, in which she asserted that “the basis of feminism was a woman’s right to be an unmarried mother.” She ridiculed reform efforts to support motherhood—“better baby funds, Little Mothers leagues, milk stations for babies, child nurseries for the children” and “mothers’ pensions”—as so many slaps in the face of women.
Her object, she said, was to give working women “a class independence which says to the masters, produce your own slaves—keep your religion, your ethics and your morality for yourselves.” She also threw a little popular eugenics into the speech, citing Friedrich Nietzsche’s warning that the world was becoming peopled by a ludicrous species, “a gently grunting domestic animal called man.”
This is an excellent article and I highly recommend it.
More Christians need to understand how Sanger so completely won a battle by confusing Christians on an issue upon which there was near unanimity among orthodox believers for nearly 19 centuries up until her campaign.
The consequences of her victory become more apparent every day and reading this article would be a good place to start for those who ask the question: "How did it come to this?"
Posted by: GL | March 25, 2011 at 11:48 AM
Be of good faith and stand strong. Sanger's "victory" will ultimately be short-lived. In fact, the tide is already beginning to turn as more and more people are now supporting life.
Remember that in the end, each of us will be paid for our day's work. As for dear Margaret, I'm sure she's enjoying her "great reward" ... wherever that might be.
Posted by: Citizen Jerry | March 25, 2011 at 02:17 PM